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all this Beethoven and rain

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Rain
Beethoven

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
Michael Ondaatje
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So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sadness is very close to hate.
Michael Ondaatje
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He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
Michael Ondaatje
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If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael Ondaatje
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Michael Ondaatje
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
Michael Ondaatje
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Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Michael Ondaatje
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
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He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
Michael Ondaatje
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You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael Ondaatje
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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
Michael Ondaatje
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she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
Michael Ondaatje
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Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje